Cirrus9announced its acquisition of Cloud-A in a news release Wednesday.

“We are merging the two companies together, and the bigger of the two would be Cirrus9,” Brandon Kolybaba, an owner and co-founder of Cloud-A, said Thursday.

“There is a financial component to it, which we are not disclosing, but it is significant.”

The new information technology infrastructure and cloud services provider will have a national focus with operations in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Alberta, Kolybaba said.

The two companies, which together have 16 employees, will hold onto their own names for now but will consider creating a combined brand. There are also plans to add more services and new facilities in British Columbia and Ontario, Kolybaba said.

“We are opening up a Cirrus9 office here in Halifax in addition to the Cloud-A branding that we have already.”

Kolybaba said the deal has been in the works for a few months.

Cloud-A, a spinoff of Dynamic Hosting, has been around for about a year. It offers on-demand cloud products and is focused on software developer and information technology integrator markets. Cirrus9 is a managed cloud and hosting services provider with several data centre facilities, he said.

“We do very similar things, and to a technical audience, we do very different things. … The combination of the two is very powerful,” Kolybaba said.

The merger will allow the companies to offer a broader range of services, he said.

“Every time that you use an Internet application, everything on the Internet has to be hosted somewhere, so that’s what we do,” said Kolybaba, vice-president of marketing for both companies.

“We host all of that infrastructure to allow your data to be resident in Canada or Atlantic Canada, or Halifax, Saint John or Calgary. We have data facilities in all those locations.”

Cirrus9 has two data storage facilities in Saint John, one of which used to be “where all the bullion was stored for the Bank of Canada,” he said.

“It’s Canada’s version of Fort Knox. It is the most secure facility for data physically in North America.”

Fred Bullock, CEO of Cirrus9, could not be reached Thursday, but in the release, he said the company has doubled its customer base in the last few months.

“This will give us the platform we need to continue that growth at that rate and even accelerate it.”

Dhirendra Shukla, a University of News Brunswick associate professor, called the merger “quite exciting.”

“Cloud is where things are going right now. … I think aggregations in this phase, acquisitions and mergers, are bound to happen, and you’ll see more of that happening in the cloud space and big-data space … as companies find their niche,” said the chair of Dr. J. Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management & Entrepreneurship.

Information technology companies are important drivers of the economy, but it would be too difficult for all of them to build their own infrastructure to host their own data, said Ari Najarian, an information technology specialist.

“That’s actually a big barrier for a lot of companies,” said Najarian, also co-owner of Torusoft, a mobile information technology software company in Halifax.

“What Cirrus9 and Cloud-A offer together is that platform, and outsource that brain trust of keeping your systems online so you can focus on the programming.”